Bandwidth lost: family planners and post-war television

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show how early planned PR efforts at the British Family Planning Association [FPA] resulted in an epoch-making television appearance in November 1955, tessellating with current methodological debates in the history of PR.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses a qualitative, micro-history approach and original archival document research conducted at Wellcome Collection, London and the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, to reconstruct early PR activity at the FPA. It intercedes in debates on historiography, the diversification of the history of PR and the concepts of mediatization and advocacy in historical contexts.FindingsAttaining broadcast coverage for birth control issues was historically difficult and was made more so by Marie Stopes. The subject was commonly packaged into the less problematic issues of population and infertility. The FPA achieved explicit television coverage in 1955 after establishing a focussed PR plan to stage and exploit a silver jubilee event. This vindicated the FPA's mission, validated service users and created broadcast opportunities.Research limitations/implicationsResearch is limited by temporal scope (1870s–1950s), and reliance on document sources, footage of television programmes being unavailable. This paper has implications for the history of PR, contributing to the diversification of the field by suggesting an original approach to the intersection of public relations and social change.Originality/valueThis paper surfaces overlooked primary sources and is the first account of how birth control appeared as a topic on early British broadcast media.

‘Unmentionable’ condoms vs. ‘glamorous’ pills: How the London Rubber Company tackled an image problem in 1960s Britain

“…The contribution of PR practice and techniques in engineering acceptance of family planning measures in the last century in as yet unmeasured, but LRC's anti-pill campaign demonstrates that PR was seen as a solution to communication problems in the birth control sector. As I have written elsewhere, the use of professional PR services was by no means limited to commercial companies and was utilised by nonprofits such as the British Family Planning Association (Borge, 2020b). Further work to complement the flurry of new literature on birth control history (Borge, 2020a;Drucker, 2020;Jones, 2020;Rusterholz, 2020) must be undertaken in order to map the prevalence of PR campaigning in the work of commercial contraceptive manufacturers.…”

Editorial 29.1: History (and professionalization) of public relations

“…The conference has resulted in several special issues and edited books, which have contributed towards the development of the discipline (IHPRC, n.y) and the CCIJ has also supported this conference with a special issue published in Volume 25, Issue 4 guest edited by Anastasios Theofilou (lead conference organizer), Dustin W. Suppa, Kate Fitch and Anastasia Veneti, a group of scholars based in the UK, US and Australia. In that first CCIJ PR history collection, scholars analysed issues such as fascist propaganda (Thompson, 2020), the writing style of a prominent Irish PR educator (McGrath, 2020), open diplomacy and the link between diplomacy, PR and journalism (Gellrich et al , 2020), 19th century PR campaign to defend national sovereignty (Tantivejakul, 2020), a historical account of creating Chartered Institute of PR in the UK contributing to writing the history of institutionalizing PR (Gregory, 2020), the post-war television and PR in the context of family planners (Borge, 2020), PR measurements in the 1920s (Anderson, 2020), the history of teaching PR in Saudi Arabia (Zamoum and Gorpe, 2020), history in the PR curriculum (Fitch and L’Etang, 2020) and the role of PR in sponsored national narratives (Kinnear, 2020). The issue alone has made a meaningful contribution to the emerging discipline of PR history scholarship; however, other papers have been published from the same conference in other journals.…”